WebKit Igalia Periodical #2

Sysprof received a round of improvements to the Marks Waterfall view, the hover tooltip now show the duration of the mark. The Graphics view also received some visual improvements, such as taller graphs and line rendering without cutoffs. Finally, Sysprof collector is now able to handle multiprocess scenarios better.

A new tool for Sysprof was added: sysprof-cat. It takes a capture file, and dumps it in textual form.

This is all in preparation to further profiler integration in WebKit on Linux. A new set of integration points is being prepared for WebKit where it can, for example, report the page FPS and memory usage to Sysprof in the Graphics view.

The JSCOnly port may be built with support for the GLib main loop when configured with cmake -DPORT=JSCOnly -DEVENT_LOOP_TYPE=GLib. This is a seldom used option and the build was broken for months, but it has now been fixed.

This week the team took some time to kickstart improvements to the documentation. One of the goals we have had in mind for long is adding pages to the manual on a number of topics, and in this vein Georges has added an overview page for WebKitGTK and Alex started a page listing some of the available environment variables.

In order to allow sharing selected content between the GTK and WPE ports, Adrian is adding support to setup additional content directories for gi-docgen and to process templates to pick fragments of the source files depending on the port.

Improving what we already have is important, and Lauro has clarified how WebKitWebView::is-controlled-by-automation works.

We lately have been deploying nightly packaging bots, to provide binaries ready to use for different projects.

These bots run once per day and upload different built products that you can check below:

1. GNOME Web Canary (built products):

   This one is meant to build GNOME Web with the GNOME SDK to produce the Canary builds of Web. Follow the progress at the corresponding Web merge request.

2. WebKitGTK and WPE WebKit MiniBrowser/WebDriver universal bundles.

   These universal bundles should work on any Linux distribution and are intended for running tests on third-party CI systems without having to build WebKit. They include inside the tarball all the system libraries and resources needed to run WebKit, from libc up to the Mesa graphics drivers without requiring the usage of containers (similar concept to AppImage). Currently these builds are used to for the WPT tests at wpt.fyi, running on the Mozilla TaskCluster CI.

3. JSC universal bundle (built products.

   Same content as the other universal bundles, but only including the jsc command line program. This is currently used by jsvu to easily allow developers to test the latest version of JavaScriptCore.